Ballots to remain uncounted in MI and Stein blocked in Philly. Guest: Election integrity, law expert Paul Lehto says this proves 'only option is to get it right on Election Night'. Also: Trump taps climate denier, fossil-fuel tool for EPA...

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Occupy Wall Street's bicycle-powered generator trashed by police in raid?; A huge victory for Keystone XL pipeline opponents --- but will it last?; Fracking chemicals found in Wyoming drinking water; PLUS: A prominent climate change skeptic calls for climate change action in Congress ... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

It would avoid the delicate Sandhills region above a shallow aquifer. Many cheer, but some environmentalists say the fight isn't over.
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TransCanada upped the ante Monday by splitting environmentalists, at least in the Midwest, and chipping away at Republican opposition that had surfaced in Nebraska. A letter from a State Department official to Nebraska legislators appeared to signal support for a state role in the rerouting decision, but it did not guarantee it would support any particular relocation proposal.

At a special session of the Nebraska Legislature, a state senator announced Monday that TransCanada had agreed to adjust its intended route of the Keystone XL oil pipeline to avoid the environmentally sensitive Sand Hills region of the state.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said on Sunday his country will make a bigger push to sell its energy products to Asia after Washington delayed a decision to approve the Keystone XL Canada-to-Texas oil pipeline project.
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"That will be an important priority of our government going forward and I indicated that yesterday to the president of China."

There is growing opposition to the Canadian tar sands. It is the tar sands in northern Alberta, Canada, located with the traditional territories of Cree, Dene and Métis indigenous communities from where the dirty tar-like oil is taken out of the ground, devastating the ecosystem, polluting the water and causing human health illnesses and deaths.

The world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be "lost for ever", according to the most thorough analysis yet of world energy infrastructure.
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"The door is closing," Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency, said. "I am very worried – if we don't change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety]. The door will be closed forever."

It is the Subcommittee's judgment that if action is not taken to reduce the environmental impact accompanying the very considerable expansion of shale gas production expected across the country - perhaps as many as 100,000 wells over the next several decades - there is a real risk of serious environmental consequences and a loss of public confidence that could delay or stop this activity.

The [Wyoming] wells also contained benzene at 50 times the level that is considered safe for people, as well as phenols --- another dangerous human carcinogen --- acetone, toluene, naphthalene and traces of diesel fuel.

The EPA said the water samples were saturated with methane gas that matched the deep layers of natural gas being drilled for energy. The gas did not match the shallower methane that the gas industry says is naturally occurring in water, a signal that the contamination was related to drilling and was less likely to have come from drilling waste spilled above ground.

Three prominent scientists will present the best case yet for the end of climate skepticism in Washington and the world over the fact that the world is warming at a congressional briefing held by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.).

'GREEN NEWS EXTRA' (Stuff we didn't have time for in today's audio report)...

[F]or me, [rooftop solar] has been a more stable and predictable investment than stocks (these days!) in that I get a monthly financial benefit (which equates to about a 5% annual return on my investment which is better than any CD) and all indications are when I sell this investment I will recover more than I put in. This is very similar to a dividend paying stock but with the very important environmental benefits which was the prime driver for my decision. Personally I couldn't be happier and consider it a solid win-win investment which is rare to find.

Metazoan-dominated reefs only took 1.5 million years to recover after the largest species extinction 252 million years ago, an international research team including paleontologists from the University of Zurich has established based on fossils from the southwestern United States.

Harsh living conditions caused by major fluctuations in the carbon content and sea levels, overacidification and oxygen deficiency in the seas triggered the largest mass extinction of all time at the end of the Permian era 252 million years ago.

The Swinburne University of Technology design graduate was driven to transform an ancient cooling technique into a new sub-surface irrigation system, following the enduring Australian drought that saw high levels of farmer suicide along Australia's Murray- Darling Basin.

Fruit, frogs, birds, insects, plants: they are all enjoying a warm autumn as the seasons go topsy-turvy. Ecologists are observing a rash of freak occurrences and oddities throughout England.
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[T]hese are the sights and sounds of an English summer. Except that they have all been recorded in the last week or so, even as shops are decking out in shiny baubles and cranking out Christmas carols.
..."Autumn has been a bit weird," admits a spokesman for the Woodland Trust.

Two reactor buildings once painted in a cheery sky blue loom over the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant. Their roofs are blasted away, their crumbled concrete walls reduced to steel frames. In their shadow, plumbers, electricians and truck drivers, sometimes numbering in the thousands, go dutifully about their work, all clad from head to toe in white hazmat suits. Their job - cleaning up the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl - will take decades to complete.
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A preliminary government report released this month predicted it will take 30 years or more to safely decommission Fukushima Dai-ichi. Like Chernobyl, it will probably be encased in a concrete and steel "sarcophagus."

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